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Intel failed to move away from declining PC chips and break into mobile. Looks like a yesterday company.

Welcome to the post- era.

Stuck in the crashing PC market and despite years of efforts to move its microprocessors into smartphones and tablets, the world's biggest chipmaker in terms of revenue has failed to deliver any real breakthrough in the mobile market.

The Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker reported this week its second-quarter earnings with both revenues and profits down to 5% and 29% - at $2 billion and $12.8 billion - respectively.

Intel backtracks on projected growth

But the worse is yet to come for Intel. New CEO Brian Krzanich admitted the company has been slow to respond to the shift in consumer spending from PCs to tablets and smartphones, while Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith now expects sales of the overall PC market to be worse than predictions made just a few months ago.

According to research firm Gartner, shipments of PCs are expected to drop nearly 11% this year compared with 2012, while mobile phone shipments will grow by more than 4% and tablets by 68%.

For 2013, Gartner predicts that 305.1 million desktop and laptop computers will ship, down from 341.2 in 2012. Meanwhile, tablets will reach 201.8 million in 2013, up significantly from 120.2 million in 2012.

Adopting ARM, a matter of survival for Intel

However, Intel's turnaround is not as hard as it seems, if only the Silicon Valley company is willing to license rival chip technology from ARM in order to really compete with , NVIDIA or even smaller Marvell in the mobile and embedded markets.

A disrupting move that former CEO Paul Otellini refused to make, but now regrets it.

"At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought," told Otellini to the Atlantic.

Let's see now if Krzanich has the oomph to make that tough choice, for the sake of Intel's long term survival.